“As long as you believe that you dwell in a universe that is a threat, you must defend yourself against it. As long as you believe that the self is flawed and that the race is doomed and evil, you must defend yourself against yourself. And how can you then trust the voice of the psyche? When I say to you, ‘be spontaneous’, how dare you take that step? To be spontaneous would obviously give rise to all the lust, passion, murder, and hatred that to you is inherent in the human heart.”

We all want to be free to be ourselves and do what we want in life, don’t we? We want to be free of judgment and fear, criticism and condemnation. The question is, how can we be free to be and do what we want when we consistently act in ways that hurt ourselves and others? Why do we not trust ourselves and one another? The answer is simple and we know what it is; it’s our survival of the fittest, Law of the Jungle mentality. When we think we’re all separate and life is a matter of survival of the fittest, we become predators and each one of us becomes fair game for the other. It’s eat or be eaten, kill or be killed in the minds of many. By choice or out of ignorance, we create the need for oppressive government, religion and laws, external regulation and control, to protect us from ourselves. As Pogo profoundly observes: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The problem is not outside us, it’s inside us, in the form of beliefs. If we choose to believe we’re separate and there’s not enough to go around, we’ll see the need to “fight” for survival, and enough will never be enough. When we see ourselves as one, interdependent and separate, we’ll work together for survival. It’s all a matter of perspective! When we treat ideas about who we are and what reality is like sacred recipes in a cookbook, never questioning or challenging them, they control our behavior, not us. When we mindlessly stick to old beliefs, like old recipes, we create our reality by default, not conscious design or intention. We need to actively challenge both our personal and cultural beliefs if we’re not happy with the reality we’re experiencing.

We are not bad, it is our ideas about who we are and what reality is that are bad.

“Trust us!” say some business and political leaders. “Greed is good, and markets free of regulation will correct themselves.” We all want freedom but freedom to do what – rape, pillage and steal? In a speech given March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry convinced the Virginia House of Burgesses to commit troops to the Revolutionary War in America’s fight for independence from England and the colonies it controlled in America. The final and most memorable phrase of Henry’s speech was, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” New Hampshire’s state motto, currently, is “Live Free or Die”. Just before my discharge from the Air Force in 1964, I had an epiphany. I realized all I wanted to do was be me! Isn’t that what we all want? Don’t we all just want to be ourselves? But, how can we be free to be ourselves and do what we want if we don’t include that same freedom for everyone?

“Okay”, you say, “but how can I give freedom to you if all you want is to steal or destroy everything I value to enrich yourself? That won’t work!”

No, it won’t, if my world view is limited and all I ask myself is, What’s going to work best for me?

Before we ask the question, What’s going to work best for me, we need to ask, What’s going to work best for ALL of us? By including everyone and all of nature in our calculation, not only do we acknowledge our oneness with (and separation from) everything, we cover all the bases. When we ask ourselves questions like What’s going to work best for ALL of us, in personal terms, and in terms of business, education, the environment and peace?, we are giving ourselves credit for being able to find good answers to these questions, whether they originate with us or not. When we ask questions like Who do I love to be? and What do I love to do?, we become conscious shapers of both ourselves and our reality, not mindless followers of established cultural and family patterns. Nor are we simply “reacting” to life.

WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY

During the course of everyday events we often forget the role of thoughts in the forging of our material reality. We get lost in the visible symbols, the material by-products of our imaginations, forgetting the invisible blueprints from which they, and we, emerge.

Pure energy, like money, its material equivalent, is shaped into matter and experience by thought. It can be used to lift up or smash down, to build character or destroy character, to express love or express hate, to beautify or make ugly.

The purpose, or challenge, of life is to learn how to use thought in its various forms to shape energy into a pleasing reality. The prize is a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of a job well done. And, like learning to walk or talk, it is a personal, subjective endeavor that requires creative aggression. It is a great balancing act, where one must accept falling down in the course of learning how to stand up.

Remember:

Thoughts are “things” with a reality of their own and you, an artist. With thoughts in the forms of belief, attitude, value and expectation you paint the landscape of your life. CREATE A GREAT DAY!

“Reality” starts with the interaction of consciousness and energy, thoughts and emotions. What we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, touch with our skin, taste with our tongue and smell with our nose is the energy of our thoughts and emotions after they have condensed into matter or experience. What our bodies call the “present” is the past for consciousness and energy because new thoughts and emotions are already hard at work forming the next moment of our material experience. Just as a glass mirror reflects the image of our physical body, reality reflects the nature of our beliefs. If we see something in our lives we don’t like, we’re meant to change it. Obviously, some things we can’t change. For example, once we lose a limb, unlike some species, we can’t grow it back. When we see that our policies (beliefs and behavior) cause us and others, more pain than pleasure, more harm than good, we can and should change them.

“God”, or the consciousness and energy of All That Is, lives within us. Therefore, the best, least traumatic and most efficient way for us to change the world for the better is for each of us to change ourselves for the better. Otherwise, as our rich history informs us, others will take it upon themselves to do it for us and who knows what or how they’ll choose to do? Here are several ways we can change ourselves for the better:

We create our reality from what we choose to believe. For example, if we believe that all men are separate and life is a matter of survival of the fittest, we’ll create a world of fear, competition, violence and pain. If we believe that all things are both one and separate and that all life is interdependent, we’ll create a world of love, partnership, peace and pleasure. If we hate ourselves, we’ll treat ourselves and others badly. If we love ourselves, we’ll treat ourselves and others well. What we’ve done in the past is not important. What we do now and in the future is what’s important.

We need to take full responsibility for creating our reality. In other words, don’t waste time blaming ourselves, our parents or society for the things we don’t like about ourselves or the world. The only reason we blame ourselves and others is because we’re not yet taking full responsibility for what we believe, for the ideas in our belief system that create our reality.

We need to get clear on what works for us and what works against us. Each one of us is a unique, individualized expression of All That Is. There is no right or wrong, good or bad, there just Is. There is what works for us and what works against us, what brings us pleasure and what brings us pain.

We need to take action every day! We need to ask questions, look for answers and keep a journal. The more time we spend bemoaning the present, the less time we have to change our future. We need to take a survey of how we spend our time and energy. For example, how much time do we spend debating issues with other people to see who’s right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid, instead of looking for solutions that work best for all of us? How much time do we spend listening to news about the state of the world instead of doing something to change it? How much time do we spend complaining about life and making excuses for ourselves, instead of doing something constructive about the circumstances we find ourselves in? (We shouldn’t feel embarrassed about this either because cultural beliefs like “you’re basically bad, you can’t trust yourself, you’re the result of a cosmic accident”, and “genes control your looks, sex, sexual orientation, intelligence and behavior” program us to accept our fate and not question it. Ideas like these tell us we can’t change so why bother?)

To start, ask questions like: Who are we? What’s reality? What’s the purpose of life? Who do I love to be? What do I love to do? What’s going to work best for ALL of us, in personal terms, and in terms of business, education, the environment and peace? To get answers, use these questions as the title of a paper for school or for yourself. Hold these questions in your mind before falling asleep and write down any information you wake up with in the morning. Meditate on these and other questions you want answers to. Use the creative nature of All That Is to find answers and then challenge them until you feel certain the answer works for you and everyone. (See: Ask Value Questions and Listen for Intuitive Answers)

Make the jump from a Value Judgment World (external value system) to a Value Fulfillment World (internal value system). The ideas we hold as beliefs serve as the building blocks for the creation of our reality. To the extent we fail to question or take responsibility for our own beliefs, we create the need for an external value system (which, in and of itself, can lead to abuse) to control our behavior for our own safety and the safety of others. In effect, we define ourselves as children who need “Big Brother” controls. To the extent we understand and apply the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you., we eliminate the need for external control.

Say, “I love myself” to yourself until you actually feel it. By going through the process of repeatedly saying to yourself, “I love myself.”, you begin to see how good you are, how much you do, and how well you do it. This process serves as an antidote to cultural messages that seek to control who you are and what you do. The more we can love ourselves, the more we can love others. The more we can appreciate ourselves, the more we can appreciate others. Let’s stop being Master Fault Finders and start becoming Masters of Appreciation!

Without taking full responsibility for creating our reality, how can we grow and how can we expect to be free?

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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A Nation of Hysterics

by Paul Campos

Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for The New York Sun, caused quite a stir earlier this month when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old son take a subway and bus by himself across Manhattan. The boy had been begging her to allow him to test his big city commuting skills on his own, and she finally agreed, handing him a map, a subway token, some quarters, and a $20 bill.

She didn’t give him her cell phone, nor did she secretly tail him as he sallied forth across Gotham alone.

“We have met the enemy and he is us!” – Pogo (an old comic strip character)

There are two types of fear. There is natural fear, which is life giving and unnatural fear, which is life destroying. Natural fear is how we react to an immediate threat, like removing our hand from a hot stove. Unnatural fear results when we fail to face up to fearful thoughts and emotions that have no basis in our immediate reality. One popular definition of unnatural “fear” is “False Evidence Appearing Real.” In the Middle East, fear is turning into anger and hate.

As we think, we create. We know this intuitively so when we imagine a frightening event growing out of something we’ve done or something we’re doing, we fear it might become real (what we give is what we get), especially when we feel guilt or shame as a result of our own actions or inactions.

For example, when we habitually eat more food than our bodies need, drink too much alcohol, take too many drugs, smoke, or refuse to exercise and develop skills that give us value to others, we know we’ll suffer somehow and at some point in our lives as a result of our own actions or inactions.

The same holds true when someone far away threatens to kill us and we don’t ask why. How can we resolve this situation peacefully by reacting to it with violence? Why would we choose to react this way unless we’re afraid to know why this person wants to kill us? Are we afraid to admit we’re doing something to piss this person off or that we’re too insensitive and uncaring to want to know what’s making him or her feel that way?

If we allow ourselves to live in a state of unnatural fear too long, we’ll become polarized and insane; oops, too late! We become dysfunctional. Eventually, dis-ease turns into disease and worse, as we can see.

The more we fear something, the more we give it power. To remove the source of unnatural fear from our lives and keep ourselves from stewing in our own juices, we need to face our unnatural fears, understand them, embrace them and move through them back to love and understanding. There are reasons why everything happens and we know that. Too often we don’t want to know what those reasons are because we may have to do something about them, like change how we think, what we do, and how we live.

There are two types of aggression in the world as well, “destructive” aggression and “constructive” aggression. What we see in our government today is destructive aggression. One of my old college physics instructors used to call this the “Brute Strength and Ignorance method” of solving problems. He discouraged us from using this method in solving physics problems. I suspect it was a shrewd way of telling us to find better ways to solve life’s problems as well.

The Bush administration falls into the Brute Strength and Ignorance category of solving problems and it scares us all because we know unpleasant consequences grow out of contempt and violent confrontation. When our own government tries to blind us with fear and invade our privacy, while shrouding their own in greater and greater secrecy; when it builds private armies to defend itself against us; when it uses our collective wealth and credit to build detention centers in our own country to disappear dissenters, we’re in grave trouble. We have become our own worst enemy and it’s time to save ourselves from ourselves.

As humans, we know we’re all going to die some day, some how. Why not focus on creating a pleasing reality so we can go out with dignity, knowing we’ve done the best job we can in creating it? Which self, which world do we want to create, and leave behind for our children?

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Although many of the entities that communicate via April Crawford’s Deep Trance Channeling ability speak and use body language, some of them communicate in handwriting or by typing on a computer keyboard. The above message was typed by one of the entities during one of the keyboard sessions. Copyright April Crawford.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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I often wonder if we’re afraid of love for fear of where it might take us. Fear is like a rock in the middle of a swiftly moving river. To be safe we think we need to hang on or be swept away to God knows where to experience God knows what. “Better to be safe than sorry”, we tell ourselves!

What a limiting view of ourselves and reality! Yet this fearful, limiting view of ourselves and reality serves as the foundation for our Old Testament thinking, and laws against any kind of deviation from any but the simplest definitions of who we are and what reality is. “Men must act like men and women must act like women”, we say. We fear our thoughts and emotions, the very foundation of our being, for their power to transform and create anew.

Is this a bad thing if it enables us to stabilize our experience, to have an experience we can depend on day after day, as opposed to more dream-like experiences that come and go as easily as we breath, as swiftly as our thoughts and feelings change? I think it does become a problem when our desire for stability and simplicity becomes a stranglehold on life, when maintaining a limited world view denies and destroys the lives and rights of others.

This fearful reaction to change, or difference, demonstrates a lack of confidence, a lack of belief in ourselves. We fear that if we open ourselves up to the power that is ours, chaos will ensue, creation will explode in all directions and we will lose our focus in this beloved illusion we call “physical” reality. (See: The Ball of Light, A Dream About the Nature of Consciousness and Being)

Oh ye, of little faith. How can this be when ours is the power and the glory of creation? Do not the Children of God (All That Is) have the same power as Him? To develop and learn to control these powers, is it not necessary to use them, to experiment and play with them? Shouldn’t we be more afraid of the destructive power of fear than the creative power of love?

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Visit The LifeSong Store where the world comes to shop for inspirational and life-changing ideas on T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, hoodies and more. Change the world for the better with POTS! (Philosophy On T-Shirts)